MrRiley Bain

Riley's research sits at the intersection of GenAI, haptic-enabled robotic control, and teleoperation/telemanipulation — focused on making remote robotic manipulation robust enough for real-world deployment. A PhD candidate, Riley is in in the School of Engineering (SoE), supervised by Dr. Van Thanh Huynh.

His primary research explores how generative models (diffusion models, VAEs, flow matching) can reconstruct control signals degraded by both network impairment and physical disturbances — things like packet loss, latency, vibration, and wind — in real-time haptic teleoperation. The aim is a single unified framework that jointly handles these disturbance types, rather than stacking separate mitigation techniques.

Riley's prior research focused on developing and managing RoboCom (https://r2robocom.com), a haptic-enabled remote robotics system being deployed in Victorian rural and regional schools. Here his interests extend to multi-user topologies for collaborative remote robotics in education, and neural super-sampling techniques (analogous to DLSS) for maintaining smooth operator video feeds over poor networks.

Previously, Riley has worked as a research assistant and project manager for RoboCom's endeavours, including trials at Portland Secondary College and Heywood Secondary College.